Compare the 10 best ClickUp alternatives for 2027, from Linear and Todoist to Basecamp and Plane, with current pricing, strengths and who each tool suits.
ClickUp set out to be the one app that replaces all the others, and for a lot of teams it does exactly that. It covers tasks, docs, whiteboards, chat, goals, dashboards, forms, automations and an AI layer called ClickUp Brain. That breadth is also the most common reason people start looking at alternatives to ClickUp. Teams that only need a clean task list or a fast issue tracker end up paying for, configuring and training people on hundreds of features they never touch. The other complaints we hear most often are about speed in large workspaces, the time it takes to set up Spaces, Folders, Lists and custom fields properly, and the learning curve for new hires and clients.
ClickUp pricing is still competitive on paper. Its pricing page lists a Free Forever plan (60 MB of storage, 5 active automation rules and 500 AI credits per workspace), Core at $9 per user per month billed yearly (shown against a regular price of $12), Business at $17 per user per month billed yearly (regular price $25), Max at $100 per user per month billed yearly, and a custom-priced Enterprise plan. The page does not list monthly-billed rates for the paid plans; it only says yearly billing saves up to 33%. Every plan now includes ClickUp Brain with a pooled monthly credit allowance (1,000 credits per user on Core, 1,500 on Business), and extra usage is sold as AI Super Credits at $10 per 10,000 credits. That is one more meter to watch on top of seats.
This guide is for teams that want less, not more: faster software, a shorter setup, and a feature set that matches how they actually work. We checked every price below on the vendors’ own pricing pages in November 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, we say so. If you are coming from a different tool, our guides to the best Asana alternatives and the best Notion alternatives cover those switches in more depth.
ClickUp Alternatives At A Glance
Tool
Starting Price
Best For
Standout Feature
Linear
Free; Basic $10/user/mo billed yearly
Software and product teams
Fast, opinionated issue tracking with cycles
Todoist
Free; Pro $5/mo billed yearly
Individuals and small teams
Natural language task capture
Trello
Free; Standard $5/user/mo billed yearly
Visual Kanban workflows
Boards that need almost no setup
Basecamp
Free; Freelancer $29/mo flat
Agencies and client work
Flat pricing with no per-user fees
Plane
Free up to 12 seats; Pro $6/seat/mo
Teams that want open source or self-hosting
Cloud, self-hosted and air-gapped options
Asana
Free for 2 users; Starter $10.99/user/mo billed yearly
Cross-functional teams
Goals and portfolios tied to projects
monday.com
Free for 2 seats; Basic $9/seat/mo billed yearly
Operations and non-technical teams
Colorful, approachable boards
Notion
Free; Plus $10/member/mo billed monthly
Docs-first teams
Tasks and docs in one database
Wrike
Free; Team $10/user/mo billed yearly
Larger teams with intake and approvals
Request forms with conditional logic
Jira
Free for 10 users; Standard $9.70/user/mo (monthly)
Agile engineering teams
Scrum and Kanban with Rovo AI
Best ClickUp Alternatives For 2027
1. Linear: Issue Tracker Built For Speed With Cycles And A 250-Issue Free Plan
Linear is the tool most product and engineering teams name first when they leave ClickUp. It is an issue tracker and product planning system with issues, cycles, projects, initiatives, roadmaps and documents. Its own homepage leads with “Designed for speed,” and the product is deliberately opinionated: there are fewer ways to configure it, which is exactly the point for teams tired of maintaining custom fields and statuses. It has also added Linear Agent, which can take delegated issues and open pull requests.
Pricing is straightforward. The Free plan allows unlimited members, 250 issues, 2 teams and 10 MB file uploads. Basic costs $10 per user per month billed yearly and lifts you to unlimited issues, unlimited uploads and 5 teams. Business costs $16 per user per month billed yearly and adds unlimited teams, private teams, guest accounts, Linear Insights, Linear Asks, Triage Intelligence and Zendesk and Intercom integrations. Enterprise is custom and annual-only. Linear’s pricing page does not show monthly-billed rates for Basic or Business.
Where Linear beats ClickUp is focus. Engineering teams get a fast interface, sensible defaults, and a workflow (triage, backlog, cycle, done) that works on day one without building a hierarchy. Where it falls short is breadth. There are no whiteboards, no chat, no time tracking and no client portal, and marketing or operations teams will find it narrow. If your company runs everything in ClickUp today, moving only engineering to Linear means running two systems.
Linear suits software startups and product teams that want their tracker to stay out of the way. If the main reason you are leaving ClickUp is that engineers avoid it, this is the strongest candidate on the list.
2. Todoist: To-Do App With Natural Language Capture And Team Workspaces From $8 Per User
Todoist is a task manager, not a project management suite, and that is why people move to it from ClickUp. You type “Send invoice every Friday at 9am” and it becomes a recurring task with a due time. It runs on phone, tablet, watch, desktop and web, and connects to Google Calendar, Outlook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zapier and n8n. Todoist also offers a public API, a CLI and an MCP server.
The free Beginner plan gives you 5 personal projects, up to 5 people per project, 3 custom filters and 5 MB uploads. Pro costs $60 per year (about $5 per month) or $7 billed monthly, with 300 personal projects, 150 filters, 100 MB uploads, full reporting history and AI features including Task Assist and Email Assist. Business, the team plan, costs $8 per user per month billed yearly or $10 billed monthly, with a shared team workspace, up to 500 team projects, roles and permissions, activity logs and SOC 2 Type II compliance.
Todoist beats ClickUp on speed of capture and daily usability. Nobody needs training to use it, and the mobile apps are among the best in the category. It falls short on anything project-shaped: there are no Gantt charts, no resource planning, no custom fields in the ClickUp sense, no docs and no dashboards beyond basic reporting. Dependencies and complex approvals are not what it is built for.
Choose Todoist if ClickUp has become a heavy wrapper around what is really a shared to-do list. Freelancers, founders and small teams that run on personal accountability rather than formal project plans get the most from it.
3. Trello: Kanban Boards Free For Up To 10 Collaborators Per Workspace
Trello, owned by Atlassian, is the simplest serious tool on this list. Work lives on boards, lists and cards, and most teams are productive within minutes. Recent additions include AI features and quick capture from email, Slack and Teams.
The Free plan covers up to 10 collaborators per Workspace, up to 10 boards per Workspace, 250 command runs per month and 10 MB per file. Standard costs $5 per user per month billed annually or $6 billed monthly, with 1,000 command runs and 250 MB per file. Premium costs $10 per user per month billed annually or $12.50 billed monthly and adds Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard and Map views, AI on boards and unlimited command runs. Enterprise is $17.50 per user per month billed annually.
Trello beats ClickUp on onboarding and visual clarity. Clients, contractors and non-technical colleagues can use it without a walkthrough, and the board model makes status obvious at a glance. It falls short when work gets complex. Reporting is basic below Premium, there is no native time tracking, and large portfolios of projects become a sprawl of separate boards rather than a structured hierarchy.
Trello suits small teams, content calendars, hiring pipelines and anyone who used maybe 10% of ClickUp and mostly lived in Board view anyway.
4. Basecamp: Flat-Rate Project Hub With No Per-User Fees
Basecamp takes the opposite view to ClickUp on almost everything. Instead of endless customization, each project gets the same fixed set of tools: a message board, to-dos, a schedule, files, a workflow board and Hill Charts for showing where work really stands. The company describes it as “the calm, organized way to manage projects.”
Pricing is flat, which is the main draw for growing teams. The Free plan covers 1 project, 1 GB of storage and up to 3 users. Freelancer costs $29 per month for up to 3 active projects, 10 GB and up to 5 users. Pro costs $79 per month for up to 8 active projects, 25 GB and up to 10 users. Pro Plus costs $99 per month for up to 12 active projects, 100 GB and up to 15 users. Pro Unlimited costs $199 per month billed annually or $329 billed monthly for unlimited projects, unlimited users and 1 TB of storage. Basecamp lists annual billing for the smaller paid plans but does not publish a separate annual rate for them.
Basecamp beats ClickUp on predictability and calm. There is less to configure, less to learn and no per-seat math when you add clients or contractors on Pro Unlimited. It falls short on structure and data. There are no custom fields, no dependencies, no Gantt charts and limited reporting, so teams that rely on ClickUp dashboards will feel the gap.
Basecamp suits agencies, studios and consultancies that work with clients directly and want communication and tasks in one quiet place.
5. Plane: Open-Source Project Tracker With Self-Hosted And Air-Gapped Editions
Plane is an open-source project management tool that looks and feels closer to Linear than to ClickUp, but adds deployment choices most competitors do not offer. You can run it in Plane’s cloud, self-host it with Docker or Kubernetes, or deploy an air-gapped edition with your own Postgres, Redis and S3-compatible storage. It includes work items, cycles with burndown charts, a wiki, and Board, Spreadsheet, List and Gantt views. Plane also offers importers from Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Asana and monday.com.
The Free plan covers up to 12 seats. Pro is listed at $6 per seat per month and Business at $13 per seat per month, with “Save 25%” and “Save 13%” badges on the annual toggle. Plane’s calculator prices 10 Pro users at $720 per year, which suggests $6 is the annual rate; monthly-billed rates are not shown. Pro includes 500 AI credits per seat per month and Business 1,000. Enterprise Grid, which covers private and managed deployments, is quoted on request.
Plane beats ClickUp on data control and price. A team of 12 can use it free, and self-hosting is an option ClickUp does not offer. The built-in ClickUp importer also lowers the cost of switching. It falls short on breadth and maturity: there is no chat, no time-tracking suite and a smaller integration ecosystem, and self-hosting means you own updates and uptime.
Plane suits engineering-led teams with compliance, data residency or budget constraints that want a modern tracker without a vendor-hosted lock-in.
6. Asana: Work Management Platform That Links Projects To Company Goals
Asana is the closest like-for-like replacement here, but with a more guided structure. It covers projects, workflows and automations, goals, portfolios, resource management and a growing AI layer that includes AI Teammates, AI Studio and Asana Dash. Its pitch is work management “built for scale,” where projects and portfolios ladder up to company objectives.
The Personal plan is free for up to 2 users. Starter costs $10.99 per user per month billed annually or $13.49 billed monthly. Advanced costs $24.99 per user per month billed annually or $30.49 billed monthly. Enterprise is priced through sales. Paid plans include AI Studio credits (50,000 per billing account per month on Starter, 75,000 on Advanced), and additional AI requests cost $0.50 each as a prepaid pack or $0.60 each pay as you go.
Asana beats ClickUp on polish and consistency. It has fewer ways to build the same thing, which makes workspaces easier to keep tidy as the company grows, and its goals and portfolio features are well suited to leadership reporting. It falls short on price and flexibility. Starter costs more per seat than ClickUp’s Core, the free plan stops at 2 users, and there are no built-in docs or whiteboards on the scale ClickUp offers.
Asana suits mid-sized marketing, operations and cross-functional teams that want structure without building it from scratch. If you are weighing Asana itself against other options, our Asana alternatives roundup compares it with the rest of the field.
7. monday.com: Visual Work OS With A 3-Seat Minimum On Paid Plans
monday.com, specifically its work management product, is built around colorful boards made of columns you pick from a menu. It is often the tool that wins when non-technical teams evaluate ClickUp side by side, because it looks less intimidating while still covering automations, dashboards, timelines and integrations.
The Free plan covers up to 2 seats, 3 boards and 3 Docs. Paid plans start from 3 seats. Basic costs $9 per seat per month billed annually, Standard $12 and Pro $19, and Enterprise is custom. The page offers monthly billing but does not list monthly per-seat prices, and it notes prices depend on your billing country. Standard adds Timeline, Gantt and Calendar views and 250 automation actions and 250 integration actions per month. Pro raises both to 25,000 actions per month and adds time tracking and private boards. AI credits are included from Basic upward (1,000 to 3,000 per month depending on plan), with extra credits priced at $10 per 1,000.
monday.com beats ClickUp on approachability. New users understand a board immediately, and the interface is easier to roll out across departments that are not used to project tools. It falls short on value at the low end. Basic lacks timelines and automations, the 3-seat minimum hurts very small teams, and automation limits on Standard are tight.
monday.com suits operations, sales and marketing teams that want a friendly visual tool and are willing to pay for Pro to get automations at scale.
8. Notion: Docs-First Workspace Where Tasks Live In Databases
Notion approaches project management from the document side. Tasks are entries in a database, each with its own page, so a PRD, meeting notes and the sprint board can live together. Notion Projects adds timeline, board and calendar views, sub-tasks, dependencies, sprints, forms, automations and integrations with GitHub, Slack, Figma and Jira.
Notion’s pricing page shows Free at $0, Plus at $10 per member per month and Business at $20 per member per month, all billed monthly, with a toggle noting that yearly billing saves up to 20%. The page does not print the yearly per-member figures. Enterprise is custom. Notion AI features such as Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes and Enterprise Search are included on Business and Enterprise; Free and Plus get a limited trial. Custom Agents are free to try and then cost $10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits. The free plan has a block limit once a workspace has 2 or more members.
Notion beats ClickUp as a knowledge base and writing tool. Its editor is cleaner, and teams that spend more time documenting than tracking will prefer it. It falls short as a dedicated task manager. Workload views, time tracking and native reporting are thinner, and a Notion workspace still needs someone to design the databases, so it does not fully solve the setup burden that drives people away from ClickUp.
Notion suits small, writing-heavy teams such as startups, content teams and product groups that want docs and light task tracking together.
9. Wrike: Enterprise Work Management With Request Forms And Proofing
Wrike is the alternative for teams leaving ClickUp because it does not feel controlled enough rather than because it does too much. It offers request forms with conditional logic, custom item types, cross-tagging, interactive Gantt charts, online proofing, resource management and real-time dashboards.
Prices are in USD and billed annually per user. The Free plan includes task management with Board and Table views and, according to Wrike’s comparison table, unlimited users and 2 GB of storage per account. Team costs $10 per user per month for 2 to 15 users and includes AI Essentials such as AI content editing and comment summaries. Business costs $25 per user per month for 5 to 200 users and adds a starter pack of AI Elite actions. Pinnacle and Apex are priced through sales. Wrike’s FAQ says Business and higher plans are annual-only, and the Wrike Whiteboard add-on costs $15 per user per month.
Wrike beats ClickUp on governance. Intake forms, approvals, proofing and cross-tagging (one task appearing in several projects) suit creative operations and PMOs that need repeatable processes. It falls short on simplicity, which matters for this list. Wrike is not lighter than ClickUp, the interface takes time to learn, and Business is priced above ClickUp’s Business tier.
Wrike suits marketing and creative operations teams, agencies with formal approval rounds and larger organizations that need tighter process control than ClickUp gives them.
10. Jira: Agile Tracker Free For Up To 10 Users With Rovo AI On Paid Plans
Jira is the default for agile software teams, and many engineering departments that tried ClickUp eventually return to it. It covers Scrum and Kanban boards, backlogs, sprints, timelines and automation, and now pitches itself as “Project Management for the AI Era” with Rovo AI teammates, AI search across Atlassian and connected apps, and the ability to assign work to coding agents.
The Free plan covers up to 10 users with 2 GB of storage and community support, and does not include Rovo. Atlassian’s published pricing tables list Standard at $9.70 per user per month and Premium at $19.60 per user per month for the 1 to 100 user tier on monthly billing, effective October 13, 2026, and annual billing is sold in user tiers at a discount of up to 17%. Atlassian states that Cloud pricing is progressive, so the per-user rate changes with team size. Standard includes Rovo Search, Chat and Agents with 25 Rovo credits per user, and Premium includes 70. Enterprise is annual-only and quoted separately.
Jira beats ClickUp for engineering depth. Its integration with developer tooling, mature sprint reporting and huge app marketplace are hard to match. It falls short on simplicity, which is the main theme here. Jira takes real administration, non-engineers often find it heavy, and teams leaving ClickUp because of complexity may simply trade one kind of configuration for another.
Jira suits established engineering organizations, especially those already using Confluence or Bitbucket, that need agile reporting and admin controls more than a light interface.
How To Choose A ClickUp Alternative
Which ClickUp Features Did Your Team Actually Use?
Start with an honest audit. Open your ClickUp workspace and list the views, ClickApps, automations and integrations people used in the last 90 days. Most teams find they relied on a handful: lists or boards, assignees, due dates, comments and perhaps one dashboard. If that is you, a simpler tool such as Trello, Todoist or Basecamp will feel like a relief rather than a downgrade. If you depended on docs, whiteboards, time tracking and custom fields together, you need a broader platform like Asana, monday.com or Wrike.
Is Speed Or Flexibility More Important?
Flexibility and speed pull against each other. Tools with fewer configuration options, such as Linear and Basecamp, can make strong assumptions about how work flows, which keeps them fast and predictable. Highly customizable tools let every team build its own system, which is powerful but slows onboarding and creates sprawl. Decide which problem you are solving. If people complained that ClickUp felt slow or cluttered, prioritize an opinionated tool and accept its limits.
How Will Pricing Scale With Your Team?
Compare total cost at your real headcount and for the next 18 months, not the headline per-seat price. Watch for seat minimums (monday.com paid plans start at 3 seats), user bands (Wrike Team is capped at 15 users), free-plan caps (Jira at 10 users, Plane at 12 seats, Trello at 10 collaborators per Workspace) and flat-rate tiers like Basecamp’s, where a large team can come out far cheaper. Also check AI costs. ClickUp, Asana, monday.com, Notion and Plane all now meter AI through credits, and heavy AI users can add meaningful spend on top of seats.
Who Needs Access Outside Your Core Team?
Clients, freelancers and stakeholders change the math. Basecamp’s Pro Unlimited plan has no per-user fees, Trello is easy for outsiders to pick up, and Linear Business adds guest accounts. Other tools charge full seats or limit what guests can do, so map out how many external people need edit access, view access or none before you pick a plan.
How Hard Will The Migration Be?
Moving tasks is easy; moving habits is not. Check whether the new tool has a ClickUp importer (Plane advertises one, for example) or whether you will rely on CSV export. Pilot with one team first, and set a clear cutover date.
Do You Need Docs And Tasks In The Same Place?
One of ClickUp’s real strengths is keeping docs next to tasks. If your team leans on that, Notion is the natural landing spot, and Linear and Plane both include lighter document or wiki features. If you are happy to keep documents in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, a focused task tool becomes much more attractive. Dedicated docs and wiki tools are another option if you want to split the two jobs.
Conclusion
ClickUp is still a capable all-in-one platform, and its current pricing (Core from $9 per user per month billed yearly) is hard to beat on feature count alone. But feature count is rarely what teams struggle with. Most teams searching for ClickUp alternatives want software that is faster to use, quicker to set up and easier to explain to new people, and every tool on this list trades some breadth for that.
For engineering teams, Linear is the clearest upgrade in speed, with Plane as the open-source and self-hosted option and Jira for organizations that need agile depth. For small teams and individuals, Todoist and Trello cover daily work with almost no setup. Basecamp is the pick for client-facing agencies that want flat pricing. Asana, monday.com and Wrike remain the choices for teams that still need a full work management platform but want more structure or a friendlier interface than ClickUp, and Notion fits teams whose work starts with writing.
Shortlist two or three tools based on what your team really used, run a short pilot, and price the plan at your actual headcount, including any AI credits. Vendor pricing changes often, so confirm figures on each pricing page before you commit.
